Introduction 

As Jeff Bezos says “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful’. Today, in this internet world, influencers play a huge role in being the word of mouth. But, who is an influencer? It can be any person who influences another, whether influencing one person or thousands of people.

CRE CLUB is India’s first ever social media loyalty platform that allows brands to connect with real, everyday users, while letting the users earn exclusive rewards based on their social influence. Whether we like it or not, all of us are influencers. Every time we post a picture on social media or answer a product query, we are influencing people’s purchasing decisions. Until now, these small amounts of influence have been difficult to track and we have done this out of our kindness. But, in return we get nothing but social capital which until now was useless. 

CRE CLUB founded by Abhas, Rupesh and Parth, IIT Bombay alumni, is here to help us put that social capital to use! There is tremendous potential in bringing influencer marketing downstream to the users who have small amounts of powerful social capital that they have not been able to exercise. 

The founders have known each other since 2014, from being in the same college as well as hostel and eventually being flatmates and co-founders. Apart from curriculars, they’ve spent an enormous amount of time in college organising fests, extracurricular activities like stand up comedy, theatre, etc. and hence are experienced in dealing with artists and influencers. That’s where the idea of capitalising on the social capital struck to them at the end of 2020. They left their jobs to work on their idea and built CRE CLUB in 2021. Abhas has experience in business intelligence, Parth in Business development and consulting, and Rupesh has management consulting experience. 

Market Opportunity 

More than the majority of e-commerce shoppers would agree that they like products/services that another user has posted about, and ask them about it. It would be easy for these shoppers if those posts would have been tagged by the user giving them ease of shopping online. E-commerce is a huge market and influencer marketing is targeting it beautifully. India currently has 572M internet users, 500M are present on social media, but only 105M transact online. This non transacting gap can be filled by alternative payment methods that enable users to pay via social posts. Retailers will love the product as they can increase conversion at checkout, acquire new shoppers, while generating margin on first sale, and drive stickiness by working with shoppers. It allows brands to reward their loyal customers as opposed to spending dollars on discount hunters.

The target market essentially are the brands that have the shoppers most likely to share content in exchange for discounts. The D2C market in India was $39B in 2020 which is expected to grow by 38% CAGR to $200 B by 2025.  In India alone there are more than 80,000 retailers/sellers registered on e-commerce enablers like Shopify and WooCommerce. Apart from this, there is also an opportunity to provide marketing solutions to 43M + MSMEs. 

100X Thesis

The product is really simple - shoppers shop like normal and when they reach the checkout page, they will be presented with the CRE CLUB button. By clicking that button, they will be prompted to enter their Instagram handle and based on a score generated, they will be offered a discount + cashback. The discount is applied automatically and the user then has 30 days to post about the purchase on social media and share the link with CRE CLUB. After the post verification, cashback will be credited. It is a tool for both users and brands and they make sure that it’s a win-win for both parties.

The idea as well as the approach has the advantage of being the first to market that will keep them apart from newcomers. Along with this, the founders are well versed with working together and have a good rapport which is essential to building a scalable business. Keeping in mind the current social media hype and the way the Indian economy is leaning towards ecommerce and the like, CRE CLUB has an opportunity to create a niche for themselves and gain traction by appealing to the trends of the current scenario in terms of D2C as well as Social media capitalization.

Conclusion

CRE CLUB is a very new idea currently not existing in India and SEA to combine the E-commerce market with Social bragging and pay via post concept. The team has done their research and are pretty confident that this is the future of marketing and shopping!

100X.VC believes that with this team, their ability and approach, it is the right mix to gain success in their pursuit!